A pair of cave lion cubs has been found mummified

After thousands of years trapped beneath the ice, their young faces are still covered in fur. You can even make out the whiskers on their cheeks and the tips of their sharp retractable claws.

Named for the Siberian riverbank where they were found, Uyan and Dina are the most complete cave lion remains ever discovered. They could prove key to learning more about a species that became extinct over 12,000 years ago.

Over the summer of 2015, flooding along the Uyandina River exposed the ice lens where the cubs were buried. By a stroke of luck, a team of contractors was in the area collecting mammoth tusks. One worker, Yakov Androsov, spotted the remains through a crack in the ice.

After so many years trapped in the harsh Siberian cold, the cubs are in surprisingly good condition."Their woolen cover, legs, tails, ears, eyes, and even moustaches were preserved," says Androsov.While they cannot say for certain how old the remains are, Androsov says previous findings suggest they are more than 12,000 years old."The most likely cause of their death is a collapse of soil, which walled up the lion's den," says Androsov.The cubs were probably between two and three weeks old when they died, as their baby teeth had not yet come through, according to Albert Protopopov, head of the Department of Mammoth Fauna Study at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). They were the size of well-fed housecats, and he says it is unclear if they had opened their eyes for the first time.

It's really uncommon to find fossils of these kind of animals. Investigators do a really nice job by discovering from which race they are, how they died, and this group did an excellent job by mantaining these cubs in a good condition, and they've just been by the side of a frozen river for 12.000 years. Such brief period of time...

Vocabulary:

Cubs:cachorros

woolen:De lana

Harsh: Duro

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151119-first-mummified-cave-lions-discovered-in-siberia